Chapter Text
It was shortly after midnight, and the cool June wind ruffled Natsuo’s hair like a long-lost friend. It had been several weeks since he’d embarked on one of his little ventures, which had as much to do with the fact that merchants hadn’t visited in a few days as it did with the new locks that his father had installed on the windows not two weeks before. Natsuo had at first worried that his father had become suspicious that Natsuo was sneaking out, but by now, he was pretty sure that it was just his father's paranoia acting up again.
Natsuo’s father, unfortunately, was a cruel, conniving man. He was known as the flame of justice to those in their village, and the name was painfully apt. His father’s justice was a perverted thing, in Natsuo’s opinion, but his father would kill for his morals—for normalcy, really, when it came down to it. Anything that challenged his normalcy was a threat, and, well, had Natsuo not been his child and Shuzenji Chiyo’s most accomplished apprentice, frankly, he would have been dead or exiled years before, back when he had started to sneak out and started hesitating less about speaking his mind.
He had started sneaking out six years before—the very evening that he had turned eleven. Two years exactly from the night his brother and mother were kidnapped by a group of sorcerers. Ever since he had heard the news from his father, Natsuo had made an oath to track down Touya and his mother.
He hadn’t been able to do much as a child, though, not until he turned eleven and realized that he could sneak out to the marketplace in the dead of night and buy books from the few merchants who smuggled in the kinds that his father had banned years before.
Anything about the world outside of the village—including maps of the surrounding regions and field journals about the different magical creatures within the thick, ancient forest that circled Natsuo’s village like a wall he could never venture past—were considered contraband. That meant he’d never even seen a map that spanned more than a thirty-mile area in his life and thus was forced to make one himself.
It had taken Natsuo years to convince the merchants that he wasn’t some spy for his father, locate the books he needed to, and scrounge up enough money to purchase them. But by now, he had researched enough to create an entire map of the surrounding region, and not only that, but one annotated with the various monsters, other beings, and geological formations that were a potential threat to a human traveling alone. He also managed to locate the various areas within the surrounding few hundred miles that a group of sorcerers—or people who were trying to hide from a group of sorcerers that they had escaped from—were likely to be.
The last thing that he needed for his planning he had managed to find tonight—a book on wisps and other common creatures in the woods nearby—specifically how to avoid them, and ward them off if need be. Given that… he could leave within the week.
On the one hand, he was ecstatic. He had been working for this for years, and the thought of finally setting out to complete his goal was nothing short of intoxicating.
On the other hand…
He knew that his quest would take months, if not a year, at least, which meant a year alone. Without his family.
He wouldn’t miss his father, that was for certain, but his sister and brother… they were all that they had ever had after their brother and mother vanished. Their father had always been a hard, cruel, distant man, so the only real love they had ever gotten as children was from each other. Not to say that their relationship was perfect—Natsuo tended to keep people in the dark, Fuyumi tried not to rock the boat, and Shouto struggled with expressing his emotions. But Natsuo loved his siblings more than anything else.
Fuyumi still didn’t know how close he was to finalizing his plans, and if she did… Natsuo didn’t know what she’d do. She disapproved of his quest, though she wouldn’t say it, but he didn’t think that she’d ever tell their father what Natsuo was trying to do. If Natsuo told her that he was leaving before the end of the month, and might not be back until the next year… he didn’t know what her response would be.
She’d pressure him to stay, of course, like she always did whenever he mentioned the subject, but aside from that, he really had no clue. They both knew full well that their brother and mother were alive, no matter what their father said. He’d asked her, once, and she had ruefully admitted that she felt in her heart that somewhere, they were out there, but she didn’t want him to leave. She’d never admit it, but she feared he’d never return.
And Natsuo knew full well that was a possibility, yes, but he trusted himself. No matter how much research he did, it was a risk. But it was a risk he was willing to take.
As for Shouto, Natsuo was most worried that if he told him, his younger brother would offer to come along. The kid meant well, and honestly, he was far wiser than he had any right to be at fourteen. But he was also reckless and set to start an apprenticeship with a nobleman in a large city, several miles away, in the fall.
Their father had arranged it, which meant that Natsuo was initially terrified that Shouto was going to hate it, but he now knew as well as Fuyumi did that Shouto was secretly ecstatic. He’d be able to leave their village for a couple of months and learn how to be a leader—a far better one than their father, or any of the elders on his council. Natsuo truly believed Shouto would be a fantastic leader, someday, and he was thrilled that his brother got to leave the village in order to apprentice under someone who would hopefully be a far better role model than their father.
Natsuo wanted that for his brother. He was under no illusions—his quest was going to be difficult, extremely so, and not the kind of thing for a boy Shouto’s age, who was still trying to figure out exactly who he was and what he wanted out of life. Honestly, it was a lot for Natsuo, at seventeen.
He had no idea how long he’d be gone, not really, when it came down to it, and he had no idea if he would be successful at all. It was hard to say until he got to the towns he needed to visit and asked the appropriate people about anyone matching the description of his brother or mother.
Wind whistled through the few thin, short trees that were speckled throughout the large yard of the Todoroki household as Natsuo jumped the pristine stone wall that stood at attention around his father’s estate like a soldier. With practiced ease, he clambered up the tree outside of his bedroom window, avoided the weak branch, and jumped to the thin outcropping of wood underneath his window.
The thick glass window to his bedroom creaked as Natsuo opened it. He winced.
However, what little Natsuo could see of his room was still coated in a blanket of darkness, and silence swept through the cool summer night.
He sighed and tumbled into the window with a faint thud.
His book was still cradled against his chest when he peered over at his desk with a frown.
A half-melted, moon-white candle stick leered out from the shadows, and a faint flame flickered from atop it, only producing enough light to cast distorted shadows on the wall around it.
Natsuo hadn’t left a candle lit when he’d left for the night. That meant…
As if his father could tell precisely when Natsuo’s stomach sunk, he began to speak in that painfully grating, condescending monotone that Natsuo had long ago learned to meet by gritting his teeth and curling his hands into fists.
“For some odd reason, I felt the need to check on you after I woke up suddenly. And when I noticed you were gone, I assumed it was merely to take a midnight walk. Against my orders, of course, but… understandable, given your... rebellious nature.”
Natsuo slowly turned his head around to his bed where his father sat with his face schooled into a cool, condescending frown.
There was no use hiding his book now.
“Father, you don’t—” Natsuo dragged himself to his feet as his stomach lurched.
His father’s ice-blue eyes glinted in a way that was almost inhuman. “You are a disappointment, Natsuo, and I believe I’ve made that clear.”
“I’m sorry for leaving without permission,” Natsuo apologized automatically, the words like ashes on his tongue.
He wasn’t sorry. Never sorry, but he had gotten good at faking it.
His father didn’t even acknowledge the apology and instead continued with that same, gruff, condescending drone. “But this is far more than a disappointment.” he spat. “When I left your bedroom to tell Kamiji to search for you and bring you back, I happened to trip over a loose floorboard by your bed.”
Natsuo’s blood felt like ice in his veins.
He was too panicked to even be angry about the way his father insisted on babying him and sending Kamiji after him. The space under the loose floorboard had been home to all of his books, all of the half-completed maps of different regions around Natsuo’s village, and the map that he had spent years completing. If his father found it…
Natsuo sank to his knees as hot tears pressed against the backs of his eyes. He had promised himself as a child that he would never cry, never plead in front of his father, but now—now—
“You don’t understand—Father, please—”
HIs father stood with a faint grunt and grabbed a long, thin, worn scroll that he had placed beside himself on the bed.
Natsuo’s map.
The one he had drawn and annotated himself with all of the places that his brother and mother were likely to be, after nearly a decade of research.
“Father, please—” Natsuo begged. “You don’t—you don’t understand—”
In the flickering, faint candlelight and distorted shadows, his father’s face looked nothing less than demonic. “No, boy, I understand it all. I understand that you’ve elected to abandon your family and your role in this village in the hopes of pursuing some childish dream.”
“Touya and Mother aren’t some childish dream,” Natsuo spat. “They’re my family, and I promised—I promised I’d find them—”
“Do not interrupt me,” Father roared, and Natsuo loathed the fear in his stomach, loathed the way he shrunk back on instinct.
He loathed the way he curled in on himself, loathed the tears that shuddered down his face.
His father didn’t even seem to notice Natsuo’s tears as he walked towards the window with his back to Natsuo. “You will be eighteen in a matter of weeks. And still, you insist on this childish rebellion of yours. It ends tonight.”
Natsuo choked back a sob. “What did you do with it all?”
All of his books. All of his research.
His father didn’t dignify Natsuo’s question with a response; instead, he grabbed the candle that had sat on his desk and turned back to Natsuo, his face shrouded by the shadows that clumped and whispered in the edges of the room like a group of old women on a late summer evening, and dipped the edge of the map into the candle’s flame.
A strangled, sob-like cry burst out of Natsuo’s chest as he dug his nails into the floorboards.
“For once,” his father hissed, his blue eyes sparkling with rage in the low light, “can’t you just accept that they’re dead? Can’t you stay away from magic? Can’t you do what you’re told, boy? Would that be so difficult?”
The flames licked up the edges of the paper eagerly, red as blood, as Natsuo’s vision blurred over with tears and his head pulsed with shock.
“You know your job,” his father said coolly. “You are a healer, much to my disappointment, but at least that is a dignified profession. Not like this questing business. You will not journey, you will not think about anything other than finding a wife and raising children that surpass yourself. You will never leave this village. Do you understand me, boy?”
A wave of pure fury washed over Natsuo as if suddenly, one of the trees in the forest that Natsuo’s whole family could barely reach around had crashed on top of him. He would leave the village, and he would find his family—of that, he had never once been more certain. But his father wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“Yes,” he lied through gritted teeth as he wiped the tears away from his eyes.
His father wouldn’t see him cry. Couldn’t see him cry.
“Good.” his father snapped.
Natsuo waited to break down into desperate, racking sobs, muffled by his hands, until long after his map collapsed into ashes at his father’s hands. He waited until long after his father left the room with a cryptic comment about the room’s sudden, unnatural cold, long after the candle’s blood-red flame faded out into nothing but smoke, blacker than the moonless sky outside.